Where the mind meets the soul.

July 2, 2017October 11, 2018

What lies beneath…

As he sipped on his whiskey, he watched her lay on the bed, lost in deep slumber. His eyes traversed up her bare back, along the wrinkles of her neck and all the way to her innocent face that was now immersed within her messy brown hair. She was beautiful. She was everything that he’d ever wanted. While the silence of the night was absolutely blissful, his heart ached as it missed the sound of her resonant voice. She’d always made him feel at peace and filled his heart with a soul that he’d never imagined to contain within him.

As a teenager, he was always the timid one, afraid to speak up, hesitant to express and preferred being unnoticed. He chose growing in the shadows rather. While people would say that, that kind of a childhood is dull and mundane, he most strongly opposed it. His theory was, if you could learn a lot being out in the open interacting with the wide array of people you encounter, how much could you learn by lurking in the shade, observing them when they thought they weren’t being noticed?

He had managed to learn so much about people. He had learnt that if actions speak louder than words, then a person’s expressions, gestures, gait and other nuances that comprise him yell out volumes. He smiled to himself as he reminisced those days of solitude. He had left them long behind on finding her, a partner, a perfect companion.

As the clock on the bedside ticked on to 4:00am, he realized it had been an hour and a half already. He looked out of the window into the mystic darkness of the night. It intrigued him. No matter how bright the day was, it had to cease to exist and fall into the abyss of utter depth and darkness. Every face on earth had this side. Everyone, no matter how beautiful, elegant or poised, had a diabolic demon skulking within. But how could one know, when the devil would strike? When the good would turn into the bad, and perhaps even the ugly?

Loitering around this thought, he got up to wash his glass and as he rose, the phone on his lap fell to the ground with a thud muffled by the carpeted floor. He ignored it and went on to clean up. He kept the bottle back to where it was, and looked around the room to check if anything was out of place.

Once he was assured, he walked over to where the phone lay, picked it up and looked into it once again. There it was, the agony to his peace. In that moment, all the happy memories that had gushed into his head shattered into emptiness. He writhed in pain as he saw the image of the woman he loved in bed with another man. Her tender hands held him close within the white sheets of the bed in this very same room. There were many such similar photos with that man in her phone and it made him wonder if he ever mattered to her.

But now he already had his answer and there was nothing he could do to change it. As he straightened himself up to leave, he turned to give the woman of his dreams one last look. There she lay, immersed in oblivion, like she was absolutely innocent. He still found her so mesmerizing. A subtle tender smile grew on his lips as he watched her. He knew if she wasn’t his, she could never belong to anyone else. Her smooth pale skin, her silky hair, her slender body and her slit bleeding throat, all lay there in those very same sheets, that were more blood red than white now.